Remembering Through the Body: Why We Turned to Research-Creation

By Alisha Stranges and Elspeth H. Brown

231 Mutual St., Toronto, former site of Club Toronto and the Pussy Palace bathhouse events. Illustration by Ayo Tsalithaba. LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory (PI, Elspeth Brown), 2023.

When we began the Pussy Palace Oral History Project, we faced a familiar problem in queer oral history. Conventional interviews privilege chronology and plot. They ask what happened, who was there, what came next. In the case of the Pussy Palace, that gravitational pull led almost inevitably toward the 2000 police raid.

But, as we have hinted in earlier posts, the Palace was more than the raid. It was a bathhouse party: a humid, crowded, erotic world that unfolded across four floors of Club Toronto. And yet there are no public photographs of it, no ambient recordings, no architectural blueprints marked with memory.

The sensory life of the Palace — its atmosphere — risked remaining unarchived, and without primary sources that index sensory detail, historical writing quickly becomes stale, unimaginative, and frankly, a bit boring.

Turning to the Body

In response, we experimented with what we later came to call somatic elicitation: a contemplative interviewing technique that interrupts narrative flow and turns attention to the body.[1]

Instead of asking “What happened?”, we asked:

Where are you standing?
What do you hear?
What does the air smell like?
How does the room taste?
If this space had a colour, what would it be?

Such questions prompted an immediate shift.

When invited to return to the pool deck and describe what they could hear, Karen B. K. Chan said: “I keep hearing, like, ice in my glass… the feeling of having a gin and tonic [on] a stolen summer night.” Sound became sensation. Memory fused with mood.

When asked about touch, Chloë Brushwood Rose recalled leaning against the wood-paneled walls. The architecture itself registered in her body: “There was a solidity to the space,” she said. “I always felt quite safe there… like a feeling of being held.”

Across interviews, smells accumulated into what one narrator called simply “the smell of wet”: soap, chlorine, sweat, damp carpet, heat wafting from one’s leathers. Individually, these fragments were small. Collectively, they formed an atmosphere.

Through narrators’ embodied, sensory memories, we sidestepped the familiar “this happened, then this happened” style of narration that appears so readily in other sources, including newspaper coverage from the time and even the narrators’ own writing in the wake of the raid. Somatic elicitation surfaced what often lingers beneath rehearsed stories: ambient joy, bass vibrations, awkwardness, erotic charge, containment, humidity. It generated an archive of feelings, as Ann Cvetkovich might say — sensorily rich, temporally nonlinear, and resistant to raid-centered narratives.

And it posed a new problem: How do you present memory that lives in sensation?

The material emerging from these interviews could not be fully conveyed through transcripts alone. Narrators described rooms that no longer exist; spaces never photographed; scenes remembered through touch and breath. We needed a visual language that could hold atmosphere without claiming documentary authority.

What followed was not a pre-planned aesthetic strategy, but a cascade of creative decisions shaped by method, ethics, and platform.

Sensory Portraits: An Aesthetic Born of Constraint

The first major experiment was the Sensory Portraits video shorts, which were designed to activate the rich oral testimony that emerged from our somatic elicitation exercise.

Initially conceived as live-action pieces using Zoom footage, the format changed when project narrator Robin Woodward asked that her image not be used — preferring to avoid what she coyly referred to as her “pandemic-winter face.” The request was modest and entirely reasonable. It also destabilized the visual foundation of the series.

We had rich audio but no archival footage — no B-roll of the scenes Robin described. Rather than abandon the project, we turned to illustration and animation. Working with Creative Producer Ayo Tsalithaba, we storyboarded scenes based on sensory transcripts. Original digital paintings — rendered in a greyscale, graphic novel style with subtle pink accents — were animated and layered with interview audio and soundscapes.

What began as an ethical constraint ultimately became the project’s aesthetic signature.

Animation could achieve something archival stills could not. It allowed us to convey humidity, shifting light, submerged bodies, and ambient sound, rendering atmosphere without claiming literal reconstruction.

The method had produced sensory density. Animation gave it form.

Watch “Sensory Memory Portrait: Robin Woodward”

Sensory Portrait: Robin Woodward.” Narration by Robin Woodward; illustration, animation, and editing by Ayo Tsalithaba; concept and direction by Alisha Stranges. LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory (PI, Elspeth Brown), 2021.

Instagram Stories: Meeting the Public Where They Gather

Selection from Instagram Stories: An Average Night. Concept by Elio Colavito; illustrations by Ayo Tsalithaba. LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory (PI, Elspeth Brown), 2021–2022.

The illustrated aesthetic developed in the Sensory Portraits soon migrated to another platform: Instagram.

Rather than simply promote the oral history collection, we created an 18-episode illustrated series depicting what might have been an “average night” at the Pussy Palace — if such a thing ever existed. Conceived by the project’s Co-Oral Historian Elio Colavito, the series drew from recurring patterns across our 36 interviews. Most patrons, for example, heard about the Palace through word of mouth. Many took the TTC to get there. Many waited in line outside before crossing the threshold into another world.

Drawing on both empirical recurrence (in the tradition of Kennedy and Davis) and narrative reconstruction (in conversation with Saidiya Hartman’s critical fabulation), we wove shared experiences into episodic scenes. Tsalithaba’s illustrations brought these episodes to life, offering imaginative re-envisionings that, at times, foregrounded trans and racialized bodies more prominently than the mostly white, cisgender narrator pool had described.

The images thus became interpretive acts, opening space for counter-histories rather than simply mirroring testimony. In this sense, the series resonates with Hartman’s argument that the challenge of representing lives partially lost to the archive should not lead to despair but instead be embraced as “the impossibility that conditions our knowledge of the past and animates our desire for a liberated future.”[2]

Instagram Stories, which disappear after 24 hours unless archived, offered a form that echoed the Palace itself: immersive yet fleeting, public yet semi-contained. The platform allowed us to meet queer and trans audiences where they already gather, translating oral testimony into visual narrative while maintaining care around privacy and algorithmic exposure.

Patrons engaging with The Pussy Palace: An Instagram Story, Gallery 1265, University of Toronto Scarborough. Photographs by Diana Pearson, 2023.

Later, the series was adapted into a self-led physical exhibition. Individual episode boards reproduced the illustrations with expanded text, while QR codes linked visitors to videograms featuring oral history soundbites. A typically virtual, vertical scroll experience became spatial and embodied again.

The Digital Exhibit: Emplacement as Method

If the Sensory Portraits responded to voice, and Instagram responded to platform, the digital exhibit responded to space.

“Explore the Palace” is the cornerstone of the project’s immersive digital exhibit. Visitors navigate nine rooms across four floors: from the first-floor threshold and dance floor to the fourth-floor photo booth and Temple. An interactive map allows users to move sequentially or jump between rooms, approximating the layered experience that narrators described.

“Explore the Palace: The Threshold,” webpage mockup. Design by Alisha Stranges, Jesse Sinfield, and Peter Luo; illustrations by Ayo Tsalithaba. LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory (PI, Elspeth Brown), 2025.

Each room is digitally reimagined using contemporary reference images and silhouetted vignettes. Glowing objects, once clicked, activate curated audio clips tied to the specific locale. Memory is anchored spatially: you do not simply hear about the Group Sex Room on the third floor; you ascend toward it — even happen upon it.

This is not simulation. It is emplacement.

Somatic elicitation revealed that memory unfolded through orientation — climbing stairs, turning corners, wading through crowds. The exhibit asks users to move in order to encounter historical fragments. It rejects the linearity of the traditional digital archive in favour of layered navigation.

Embodied memory demanded spatial design.

Research-Creation as Public History

None of these outcomes were aesthetic embellishments added after the “real” research was complete. Rather, they emerged during the research itself in response to methodological and ethical challenges.

The Pussy Palace oral histories routinely produced material that exceeded narrative explanation. Ethical care reshaped visual strategy, while the absence of archival imagery demanded invention. Each constraint generated form.

For queer and trans histories — especially those rooted in erotic life — archival absence is common. Atmosphere evaporates. Buildings close. Photographs are scarce or risky. To document such worlds requires more than preservation; it requires creative mediation.

In this context, research-creation — combining creative artistic practices with scholarly research to generate new insights — is not decorative. It is an ethical and epistemological stance. It acknowledges that some histories survive in bodies before they survive in documents, and that public history must sometimes move, glow, animate, and breathe in order to carry them.

Research-creation is not an aesthetic supplement to scholarship. It is our methodological response to embodied memory. The Pussy Palace persists not only in court transcripts or newspaper headlines, but in remembered dampness, wood grain, chlorine, laughter.

To tell that history faithfully, we had to follow sensation where it led.

---

[1] Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe : A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 12, no. 2 (2008): p. 13.

[2] To learn more about somatic elicitation, see Alisha Stranges and Elspeth H. Brown, “Sensing the Palace: Somatic Elicitation in Queer Oral History,” Journal of Lesbian Studies (2026): 1–22, doi:10.1080/10894160.2026.2612802.

Alisha Stranges is a public humanities scholar based at the University of Toronto. She serves as Research Manager and Project Oral Historian for the LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory, where her work bridges oral history, performance, and digital research creation.

Elspeth Brown is Professor of History at the University of Toronto and Director of the LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory. A scholar of queer and trans history, oral history, and archives, she is the author of Work! A Queer History of Modeling (Duke University Press).

To learn more about this history, visit our project websiteor explore our immersive digital exhibit.